Back in February of this year, Pronet Advertising’s Neil Patel offered an open challenge to Sequoia Capital’s Jason Calacanis pertaining to SEO. The challenge was initiated after Jason Calacanis implied that SEO was bad. Patel believed he could he could take Calacanis’s blog and increase the search traffic by a minimum of 10-20 percent, 30 days after his changes were in effect. He made step-by-step instructions for the changes, and even allowed Calacanis.com’s own programmer and designers to implement them. The essence of the deal according to Patels’ blog reads:

“If you win, I can post about the fact that SEO is really an over-rated science and actually have proof to back it up. If I win, you post that SEO is awesome, and again with the proof to back it up.”

Calacanis did accept the invitation to the challenge and told Patel to prove his point. In an interview with Webpronews at the SES conference, Patel talked to us about the whole ordeal. It has been over two months since the outbreak of the challenge and, so far, the traffic on Calacanis.com has increased 25 percent. The results are not entirely accurate, since Calacanis wrote about the Oscars the day before the challenge was scheduled to begin. If he had not written about the Oscars, the traffic increase would have been up some 40 percent. Based upon the percentages, Patel has won the challenge. However, Jason Calacanis has yet to come clean and post his end of the bargain.

The changes that Patel implemented are what some would consider small changes, but they, obviously, had a big impact on Calacanis.com. Patel changed the meta tags and title tags. He also made the meta description unique. Not only do these developments bring about more search results, they also bring more efficient results. If Calacanis wants to continue with the revisions, Patel suggests he work on title attributes next.

Calacanis argued that SEO manipulates natural results, making it unethical. On the flip side, SEO supporters believe it makes websites better and provides them with better rankings. SEO is a business. According to Patel, if a business continues to bring in more revenue, it will essentially become a better company.

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